On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (28 page)

Nevertheless, Sondheim’s approach provisions more meticulous character interaction, fluid and elusive. James Goldman’s surrealistic
Follies
script gives its two couples choices to make on an almost line-by-line basis. Sondheim’s
Follies
songs pin them down like butterflies on velvet … and yet.
Does
Ben love Sally? It’s the very center of the show, the revisiting of the past, the reviewing of the choices, the life you should have led. Sally’s so shallow that her choice comes down to the color of her dress. “I should have worn green,” she tells us. Yes, that’s why you’re unhappy. You forgot to wear green.

Then, too, Sondheim’s interests draw him to gifted, intense, or damaged figures. No performer from the era of
Good News!
(1927) or
Anything Goes
(1934) could have justified, for example, the two leads of
Sunday in the Park With George
, especially that art-absorbed painter who
does not share
. That’s what makes him marvelous: he is almost literally made of art, art that Dot, his lover, admires. But it makes him impenetrable. Women look for a man who recalls to them their view of their father when they were very young, as a source of love and power. A supportive father creates the need for a supportive partner; a neglectful father leads to an unhappy relationship: the one Dot has with George. But a substitute relationship with a “good father” won’t work for her. When Dot takes up with Louis, a genial baker, she notes, in the restless “Everybody Loves Louis,” that the entire world appreciates the baker and
his
art, making cakes. He’s so agreeable, so pleasant and available. Then comes the Sondheim zinger: “That’s the trouble, nothing’s wrong with him.” Because interesting people are screwed up, and Sondheim writes about interesting people. Only interesting actors can play them.

Passion
’s three leads offer challenges, each in a different way, because—in true scapigliato style—they belong together while not belonging together. That is, Giorgio and Clara are beauties. They deserve each other. But their passion doesn’t last. That of Fosca and Giorgio does, eternally, as we learn in the musical’s last seconds. Yet Fosca, anguished and the cause of anguish, does not, by the rules of love, deserve Giorgio.

Scola’s film emphasizes these anomalies, casting the all but implausibly handsome Bernard Giraudeau as Giorgio and the steamy Laura Antonelli as Clara. Fosca was Valeria D’Obici. “A monster,” Giorgio calls her, and Scola films her as one, with her hair pulled back and her teeth thrust forward like a vampire’s.
^*
One shot, devoted to another of Fosca’s screaming faints, is immediately followed by a view of two skulls. Or: she literally kisses the hem of his uniform tailcoat, whereupon Scola shows us Giorgio and Clara in bed, cutting thence to Fosca banging on piano keys in rage.

The Scapigliatura wrote the preface to Modernism, and Sondheim is the musical’s Neo-modernist, so no wonder he was attracted to the subject. Interestingly, the musical
Passion
is subtly diverted from the scapigliato atmosphere of the novella and film, losing some of their—here’s that word again—disjunctive aspects. For example, the novella is narrated by Giorgio himself, and, in Scola’s version, when the narrative is done, a dwarf, to whom he turns out to have been telling the tale in a tavern, gets up to leave, roaring with laughter as he goes. Why a dwarf? And why laughing? On one level, the scapigliato aesthetic needed to unnerve its audience with the bizarre. After all, the story is already unthinkable—Giorgio and Fosca sitting in a tree,
kay eye ess ess eye enn gee
. So why stack your bombshells? Why not, instead, try to naturalize the tale, leaving out the baroque vexations, smooth it down to its genuine feelings?

This is what the musical
Passion
does, in every respect. It subdues the grotesqueries of novel and film, and the original Broadway production underlines this in its casting. As Giorgio, Jere Shea was an impressive leading man, young but mature, not the novel’s boy-in-uniform. Fosca was not a “monster” but Donna Murphy in dowdy makeup. Then, too, Tarchetti’s Clara, a ravished nymph hoping for more, always more, was, like Giorgio, bumped up in age and experience. But then, it is difficult to find actors who suit character while commanding their share in a Sondheim score. Casting an Italian film is a cinch, because actors are chosen for their looks; movies are shot silent and dubbed later to create multi-lingual release prints. But one can’t cast the musical
Passion
on looks alone, not least because the espressivo inherent in the vocal lines demands seasoned performers. To repeat, Sondheim doesn’t think of his shows as operas. Still, a narrative as intensely musicalized as
Passion
demands intensely musical performers. It’s a truism, of course, but it reminds us to wonder where exactly Broadway ends and opera begins, especially after
Porgy and Bess
,
The Most Happy Fella
, and
Candide
.

Intensely musical performers, yes: who can also build character like a Method ace. That is the third revolution in who gets to be in musicals. It’s worth remarking that the academic world first took interest in the musical after the Sondheim-Prince era, for those titles offered dense psychological and thematic content for critics and historians to explore at length. But more: the training, so to say, of a generation of actor-singers took off in these very shows, making them an academy in themselves. Sondheim thought that Donna Murphy gave one of the most persuasive auditions (for
Passion
) that he’s ever seen. It was like Rodgers whispering to Hammerstein, when Yul Brynner came on stage, seated himself cross-legged, and broke into a Mongolian folk song to his own guitar accompaniment, “There’s our King.”

Indeed, there were great performances in musicals before Sondheim-Prince. But, from
Company
on, shows began to require unique performers as a rule, because the roles became unique—Robert, Ben, Désirée, Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. Perhaps an authentically scapigliato
Passion
musical would have ground up the gears of art, overloaded Broadway with information derived from twentieth-century Italian firebrands stuck in the nineteenth century. That’s too much source material to juggle at once. Sondheim’s
Passion
is startling, but not aggressive: it steals into the ear by degrees, just as Giorgio begins as a pleasantly ordinary youth and only gradually becomes haunted and focused. He moves from Clara, who is easy and acceptable. And he moves toward Fosca, who is utterly deranged.

Ettore Scola’s
Passion
is startling and aggressive. He filmed Fosca’s main entrance into the action gliding nimbly down the stairs to the officers’ mess as if propelling herself forward. Destiny and death await; yes, she comes! But in the musical, she descended stealthily, as if wary of her own tragedy. Yet she cannot resist, for everyone needs a Giorgio (or a Robert, Ben, Franklin Shepard). Still, we already knew that
Passion
’s surprise is that Giorgio needs a Fosca.

It’s a small piece,
Passion
. Tightly controlled yet all but gushing with music. Paradoxical, then. Of course there would be a ruined castle in the work—in book, film, and musical alike—because the scapigliati loved articulating their futuristic worldview by using Romantic memes (chivalry, ghosts, the fear of engulfment) in contemporary settings. And that is Sondheim’s
Passion
, an old tale revitalized by the new style of Broadway actor-singers. What would the piece have been like with the most vivid opera people—Maria Callas as Fosca, say, with Franco Corelli as Giorgio and Anna Moffo as Clara? It’s not an outrageous hypothetical, for Sondheim breaks boundaries. Though it won the Best Musical Tony award,
Passion
was not appreciated at first.
Norma
wasn’t, either. Its premiere, at La Scala, was a disaster. Now it is regarded as a
summum bonum
of Italian opera. Or, to restate the thought by bringing it back to Broadway, Barbara Cook thinks
Passion
is, with
Sweeney Todd
, Sondheim’s best music.

^*
There’s a taste of
Follies
in this, too: Ben loves Sally but needs Phyllis.

^*
The actress was actually a looker, and Scola’s casting her against type may have contributed to her Fosca’s winning the David di Donatello Best Actress, Italy’s equivalent of an Oscar.

The Frogs

Ancient Greek humoresque performed in Yale University’s swimming pool, 1974.

Based on the play by Aristophanes.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Burt Shevelove. Original Leads: Larry Blyden, Michael Vale, Anthony Holland, Jerome Geidt. Director: Burt Shevelove.

Expanded into a dry musical comedy, 2004. Book adapted by Nathan Lane. Original Leads: Nathan Lane, Roger Bart, Daniel Davis, Michael Siberry. Director: Susan Stroman.

First performed during one of the Athenian drama festivals in 405
B.C
., Aristophanes’
The Frogs
follows the voyage of Dionysos—the god of drama and drink—into hell to bring back a great playwright to restore the vanished glory of the stage. I have laced the following synopsis with anachronisms, to suggest Aristophanes’ many contemporary references and general zaniness:

PROLOGOS: Dionysos and his servant, Xanthias, visit Herakles, who gives directions to Hades. First, there’s Charon’s ferry:

DIONYSOS
:
Is it expensive?

HERAKLES
:
He takes Visa. You’ll hear sweet music and meet enlightened theatregoers. Before that, though, there’s a vast bog filled with evildoers. Liars, cheats, patricides …

DIONYSOS
:
And fans of
Glee
and Frank Wildhorn?

SCENE: The voyage across the River Styx.

KOMMOS: (usually a lament or disturbing passage): An offstage chorus of frogs.

SCENE: Dionysos and Xanthias gain hell’s frontier.

PARODOS (traditionally the chorus’ first entrance into the playing area, danced as well as sung): Spirits direct the pair to Pluto’s palace.

SCENE: Pluto’s doorkeeper, Aeakos, threatens Dionysos:

AEAKOS
: Terrors await! Cyclops! Medusa! Jimmy Carter’s man-eating bunny rabbit!

SCENE: A banquet. Aeakos whips Dionysos:

DIONYSOS
:
Augh! Oof! Misery!

AEAKOS
:
Bet you felt
that
one.

DIONYSOS
:
(sarcastically) No, I was quoting from Newt Gingrich’s secret garden of love poetry.

PARABASIS (a choral hymn, detached from the play’s action, on political events of the day)

SCENE: Pluto decrees that Euripides and Aeschylus vie for the chair of First Playwright.

AGON (a contest between opposing forces) Euripides begins; Aeschylus says nothing:

EURIPIDES
: Another of his famous Profound Silences! He went completely Actors Studio after Tony Franciosa got here!

Aeschylus inspires with nobility, Euripides educates with realism, and, at length, Dionysos chooses to brings Aeschylus back with him to Athens.

EXODOS: Pluto wishes Dionysos godspeed, and a chorus concludes the work.

So. Burt Shevelove wanted to stage his own version of
The Frogs
in the swimming pool of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium, and he asked Sondheim to supply the needed incidental score. There were only two songs as such, the opening “Invocation and Instructions To the Audience” and, near the end, “Fear No More,” the words taken from
Cymbeline
—for, in Shevelove’s version of Aristophanes, the two playwrights in the underworld were Shakespeare and Shaw, and their respective virtues lay in poetry as opposed to sociopolitics. (Shakespeare wins the Agon.) All the rest of the score was choruses—the kommos, parodos, parabasis (which did have some solo lines), exodos—plus an opening fanfare.

Thus, at Yale in 1974,
The Frogs
was a play with music. A show that doesn’t let its characters vocalize isn’t a musical, and that is a waste of Sondheim. Worse, the 1974 score wasn’t recorded in full till much later, so few could assess it. Worst of all,
The Frogs
(Sondheim tells us in
Finishing the Hat
) was “one of the few deeply unpleasant professional experiences I’ve had.” The dean of the Yale School of Drama, Robert Brustein, was one of the most disliked people in the theatre community; Sondheim insisted that he take no meetings with Brustein during production. But Brustein found another way to interfere. Though
The Frogs
was essentially a school play—the ensemble included students Meryl Streep, Christopher Durang, Sigourney Weaver, and Alma Cuervo—Brustein invited the New York critics to the premiere, which, because of incompetent set building, was in effect the only dress rehearsal.